"An iconic Lebanese-American cultural figure." —Paris Review
"Etel Adnan is a polymath. Her work crosses many dimensions: cartographies, drawings, films, notebooks, novels, paintings, plays, poems, political journalism, tapestries, teaching, and her most recent works, her sculptures. Adnan is one of the greatest artists of our time, and an inspiration to so many other artists." —Hans Ulrich Obrist
"Etel Adnan is a remarkable visionary, poet, writer, philosopher, and painter. An intellectual mind who dares to dream. She takes us to worlds that are real and other worlds at the same time." —Robert Wilson
The fourth volume in PAJ’s Performance Ideas series, The Sun on the Tongue unfolds in an expanding universe of philosophical reflections on love, art, war, nature, and human existence. Etel Adnan, the internationally renowned Arab American writer and visual artist, crosses genres and continents and centuries in her literary texts, plays, poems, and art. Her plays At A Certain Hour of the Night, Crime of Honor and Tolerance are featured here, along with essays on Pina Bausch and Paul Klee, and an interview on her life and work. Her texts have been performed or adapted for theatre, opera, and radio in the U.S. and Europe. Robert Wilson invited her to write the French section of his multi-country opera, the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down, in 1984.
Born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925, Etel Adnan has received many awards for her more than fifteen books: France Pays-Arab Award, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award, Arab American Book Award, California Book Award for Poetry, Small Press Traffic Lifetime Achievement Award, Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, and Lifetime Achievement Award from Radius of Arab American Writers. The Etel Adnan Award for Women Playwrights was established by the Al-Medina Theatre of Beirut to support women writers in the Arab World. She was honored with France’s L’Ordre de Chevalier des Arts in 2014. Adnan’s paintings, drawings, fold-out books, ceramics, and tapestries are exhibited on several continents, with recent solo shows at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin); Museum der Moderne Salzburg; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art (Doha); dOCUMENTA (13) (Kassel); MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA); Zentrum Paul Klee (Bern); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Etel Adnan is represented by Galerie Lelong, Paris and New York. She lives in Paris.
Additional titles in the Performance Ideas series include:
newARTtheatre
Conversations with Meredith Monk
art is (Speaking Portraits)